For example, I was told to search for !catsubs@kbin.social from Lemmy.world in order for Lemmy to fetch it, but searching that using Lemmy search doesn’t work. What am I doing wrong?
I’ve found that I’ve had best success for bin magazines by searching for the entire URL, e.g. https://kbin.social/m/catsubs
That being said, your !catsubs@kbin.social link worked just fine when I clicked it from my own instance.
Edit: Realized your home is lemmy.world. I believe the !catsubs@kbin.social link format may not work from there as they’re still on 17.4, waiting fro 18.1 release rather than upgrading to 18.0. So, my positive experience may not mirror your own.
If you have the name of the sub and the name of the instance, do your instance the/c/ then the sub name.
For your example it would be lemmy.world/c/catsubs@kbin.social
Then you can subscribe to it from your lemmy.world username.